1960's Government and Politics | Radical Politics: Black Power

Cracks in the Civil Rights Movement.

Chants of "black power," the slogan popularized by Stokely Carmichael and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the Mississippi freedom march of June 1966, were the first signs for most of the American public that some factions in the civil rights movement were beginning to question the methods of nonviolent protest advocated by the movement's popular and widely admired leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King argued to Carmichael and Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) that "black power" had connotations of violence that would (and in fact did) frighten white supporters of the civil rights movement, but Carmichael, who agreed not to use the slogan for the remainder of the march, was already convinced—as was McKissick—that passive resistance to physical force and building...